Music and Dance Reviews : A Few Treats From Kronos Quartet

It may have been a day early for Halloween festivities, but the Kronos Quartet turned Wadsworth Theater into a musical fun house Friday. The new music adventurers brought with them a full bag of sonic tricks and treats.

The tight second half began with the world premiere of Jay Cloidt’s “Exploded View,” a five-part piece for MIDI strings controlling a varied bank of unconventional samples. There seemed to be a few technical glitches, but the performance--electronically moderated by the composer on-stage--proved an inventive tour-de-force.

It was also humorous and perception-tweaking, as the relationship between the material and the medium was almost entirely one of incongruity and even irrelevance.

This led to Bob Ostertag’s “All the Rage,” an evocation of the kind of agitprop power not much heard since the days of Martirano’s ‘L’sGA. It cued taut, often violent string music from a tape mixing edgy, obsessive sounds recorded at a San Francisco protest with angry narration of gay-bashing horrors.

Kronos followed it with the otherworldly tintinnabulation of Part’s “Summa,” in a version for string quartet. The progression from environmental sound manipulation through sociopolitical anguish to spiritual benediction was stunning.

It may be churlish to quarrel with generosity, but the substantial encore almost negated that carefully crafted catharsis. Scott Johnson’s “It Raged” combined jittery quartet writing of more energy than distinction with taped pontifications of I. F. Stone.

On the first half, composer Steve Mackey joined the ensemble on electric guitar for his “Physical Property,” which dabbled in vernacular suggestions without any sense of stylistic confrontation or internal propulsion. Part II of Mary Wright’s “Jeff and Jenny” left the actual work of the quartet overshadowed by florid electronic Doppelgangers, while the three movements of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Yiddishbbuk” added up to something less than the sum of their often imaginatively scored, thinly developed episodes.

This trio of local premieres sounded rather uncertain and effect-oriented in contrast to the muted austerity of Gubaidulina’s quietly brilliant Quartet No. 2.